Articles from 1919
A 1919 film review of Broken Blossoms, directed by D.W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess:
Broken Blossoms came to the screen a masterpiece in moving pictures. Bare narration of the story cannot hope even to suggest the power and truth of the tragedy that Mr. Griffith has pictured.
You can read more about Lilian Gish here
A thumbnail biography of the celebrated silent film director,D.W. Griffith
At the time this profile first appeared in 1919, P.G Wodehouse (1904 – 1975) had recently resigned his post as the drama critic for Vanity Fair in order to realize his ambitions as a novelist and playwright. This article revealed to all Wodehouse’s keen interest in American slang and American comic strips.
Figures were presented at the National Lynching Conference showing that in the last thirty years 3,224 persons have been killed by lynching, 2,834 of them in Southern states which once were slave-holding.
Disgusted with being remembered for only playing the role of vampires, Theda Bara wrote this piece where she listed several sound reasons as to why she would never play such a roll again:
To me, there is nothing so quaintly naive as this inability of the moving picture public to disassociate the screen personality of a star from his or her own personality. I wonder what they think a Mack Sennett bathing girl must be like around the house.
Sergeant Alexander Woollcott (1887 – 1943) wrote this article so that his New York readers (whom he had not addressed since signing on with the Doughboys) would know the key roll Corporal Harold Ross (1892 – 1951) played as Managing Editor at the Paris offices of The Stars & Stripes. Anyone who glances at those now brittle, beige pages understands how sympathetic the The Stars & Stripes and their readers were to the many thousands of French children orphaned by the war; Woollcott makes it clear that it was Harold Ross who was behind the A.E.F. charities that brought needed relief to those urchins.
It seems certain that no man in the A.E.F. had a greater influence on it’s thought and spirit…The men who worked with him on The Stars & Stripes considered him the salt of the earth.
To read another W.W. I article by Alexander Woocott, click here.
Written during the closing days of the paper’s existence, the reporting journalist could not emphasize enough how lousy the paper was with enlisted men serving in the most important positions. You will come away with a good amount of knowledge concerning the manner in which THE STARS & STRIPES crew addressed their daily duties and still made it to the presses on time. Surprising is the high number of experienced newspapermen who wrote for the paper during the paper’s short existence.
Click here to read World War II articles from YANK MAGAZINE.
A few historians tend to believe that the sobriquet Doughboy had it’s origins in the 1846 – 48 war with Mexico (a perversion of the Spanish word ‘adobe’), but the attached article makes a different reference, dating the term to the American army’s period in the Philippines. An effort was also made to explain the term Buck Private.
Click here if you would like to read an article about the Doughboy training camps.
If you’ve been jumping from site-to-site for the past twenty minutes looking for reliable information regarding the early career of a silent film actor of the U.K. persuasion who was known as James Knight (1891 – 1948) – you have found it. Click the title above, gaze at the digitized image of his smiling mug and read on!
A black and white photograph illustrating one of the many iron tree stumps used throughout the war which served as field observation posts. It was in the night, when work was done by both sides to preserve and refortify their respective trenches that objects such as these were erected.
